HE'S the bloke, painted head to toe in silver, who never fails to pull a crowd on Princes Street. Master mimer. I was wondering how the Festival's been for him, bearing in mind the climate . . . economic and weather-wise.
Silverman (you won't get any other name out of him) tells me "For me personally it's been okay. No complaints. The people who see me on Princes Street don't realise I've been doing my own 45-minute show during the Festival these past 15 years, in Par
liament Square or in the High Street round the corner.
"So when it rained – and didn't it bucket! – I'd nip down and busk in Princes Street instead, in comparative shelter. It was tough, though, on the performers who relied on work uptown. They were often completely washed out. It can be a hard, hard life."
Down on the street (whatever happened to Shakatak?), close to Silverman's pitch, punters were entertained by Red Indians festooned with feathers, "war dancing" and playing pan pipes with forked tongue.
Silverman enlightens us "There were three Red Indian groups in town, a couple at the East End, and in fact they're Peruvians. By painting themselves red they make more money. Every big city's got them . . . Stockholm, Barcelona, Amsterdam."
So their ancestors didn't fire arrows at John Wayne and Glenn Ford after all?
Spit for a million Before your time, of course, but think Dad's Army for a minute. This day in '39 sirens wailed over Edinburgh. The outbreak of war and Bonhams the auctioneers are bringing it back with the photograph of a Spitfire in their worldwide catalogue.
No ordinary Spit, it's a MK XVI that saw active service with the RAF in the conflict and later was part of the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight before it was donated to the United States Air Force in 1959.
It found its way to New Zealand and, restored to near-perfection, this dream machine is about to be auctioned there in Wellington on Sunday week, where it is expected to fetch £1 million.
If I won the Lottery and found a spare million I'd buy it myself. But I'd have nowhere to put it. And colleagues are telling me to get my priorities right and buy a keeper for Hibernian instead.
The full article contains 387 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
